Former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon got it right about the latest North Korean nuclear weapon outrage: neither Kim Jong-un nor Donald Trump are a safe pair of hands for nuclear weapons. A majority of the world’s governments agree with him, and have created a global nuclear weapons prohibition treaty declaring all nuclear weapons and threats of their use inhumane, illegitimate, and criminal.

Some insist that North Korea’s latest and most disturbing missile test is proof of why other nations must retain their reliance on deterrence and even expand their nuclear arsenals.

That in turn fosters the proliferation dreams of the nuclear wannabes – with their promise of nuclear nightmare for the rest of the world. And it also feeds the understandable perception that the West’s efforts to rein in North Korea or others like Iran are driven by hypocrisy and self-interest.

Only when we devalue all nuclear weapons by outlawing them through an international treaty can we reduce the risk of countries like North Korea developing them further.

For the first time in the seven decade history of nuclear weapons, the majority of the world’s governments are making clear that they will no longer accept the legitimacy of nuclear weapons for defence.

The nuclear ban treaty process constitutes a rebellion by the non-nuclear states against the self-proclaimed ‘right’ of the nuclear states and their allies to hold the whole world hostage.

Each of those steps should be of crucial interest to Australia, not least those that attend to the terrible impacts of the British nuclear tests here in the 1950s.

But despite condemning North Korea for its move into this dangerous world, our government has boycotted the UN talks at the behest of the United States.

Indeed, that ill-considered boycott has left us isolated in our region. Nearly every other country in East and Southeast Asia and the South Pacific has participated in the ban treaty talks, with Indonesia, Thailand and other ASEAN states taking a leading role.

The nuclear ban treaty is not a guarantee that nuclear weapons will be abolished tomorrow.

But it is the foundation for a new beginning in that historic struggle, starting from a global recognition of the undeniable catastrophic harm that any use of nuclear weapons in war will bring.

That includes catastrophic harm not just to millions incinerated in burnt cities but also many millions more in the famines and economic collapse from the nuclear winter that will undoubtedly follow even a ‘small’ nuclear exchange.

After half a century of waiting for the nuclear weapons states to live up to their disarmament promises under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the majority of the world’s government have rebelled.

They have rejected the acceptance of the inevitability of a nuclear armed world and the destructive hypocrisy that underlies ‘concern’ about one country’s nuclear weapons, while viewing the others as ‘responsible nuclear powers’.

Countries like Australia, which claim protection under the US nuclear umbrella, will now have to justify – to both their neighbours and their citizens – their reliance on a policy of extended nuclear deterrence, a policy that requires an absolute intent to burn millions in the cities of Asia in the name of nuclear defence.

And it is not inconceivable that in the foreseeable future some of the nuclear states will sign up to a treaty. The most obvious candidate is the United Kingdom where intense debate surrounded Prime Minister Theresa May’s 2016 decision to renew Britain’s four nuclear ballistic missile submarines and their Trident-II missiles leased from the U.S. Important figures in the British military and her own party publicly doubted the utility of the weapons and their massive cost.

After the disaster of May’s snap election last month, the question of what would have happened to that decision were it to be taken now is not simply a matter of an academic what-if. Britain as a threshold nuclear disarming state is quite conceivable, if still a long way off.

The nuclear ban treaty is not a panacea, and won’t bring world peace tomorrow. But it is the beginning of the end of a world where a small number of countries can, with impunity, arrogate to themselves the right to annihilate the rest of us – all in the name of false idol of ‘security’. Nuclear weapons, whether Russian, Chinese, North Korean or American, are the antithesis of sustainable global security.

It is useful to look back on the evolution of bans and shifting attitudes towards other classes of weapons, including chemical and biological, flame and napalm, cluster bombs; and especially the evolution of attitudes towards harm to civilians in armed conflict. On some of these subjects attitudes have become relatively settled, on others still murky and inconsistent. But the shifting of attitudes has involved pressure of opinion.

Australia’s position is deeply connected to the pressure in 1970 against the ratification of the NPT, as well as our fealty towards the United States and fantasy dependence on the US nuclear umbrella.

Note the titteration of established opinion when during the recent UK election campaign Jeremy Corbin suggested he didn’t want to use nuclear weapons at all. Even in a situation where weapon use is futile or worse, governments (and public opinion) are slow to abandon them.

There are still archaeological remnants of the Australian nuclear power and weapons program. If you go to the carpark at the end of the road in the Booderee National Park, Jervis Bay NSW, that cleared space was to be the site of our nuclear power reactor.

The reactor for which there was a hunger at the time was the Canadian CANDU reactor with its fatal flaw of allowing extraction of weapons grade plutonium from unenriched uranium in a manner hard to detect. A flaw well known to those most keen to have the reactor.

In the 1950s many of the best minds in physics, in many countries, went into the whizz-bang field of nuclear physics. That stream and its status persist as a bit of a problem when it comes to politics and public policy. A surgeon once offered me the joke question: “What’s the difference between god and a neurosurgeon?” to which the answer is “God knows he’s not a neurosurgeon.” The joke could be shifted from neurosurgeon to nuclearphysicist, but with less smile. It remains hard to get nuclear power advocates to consider the dark problems of quality management and long term waste storage. It’s not the technology, not the science – it’s the people. The problems are identical in relation to nuclear weapons: who is in charge and who dies when.

While the treaty initiative is important, there is need to bring the sheepdogs around to this end of the screaming horde too, to challenge the advocates on home ground. Not easy. I have, long ago, had the experience of conversation with a senior person from Los Alamos with determined views on retesting and modernising weapons, but no desire to have even an inkling of moderated awareness of issues relating to use: trapped in Strangelove. The US is going through that whizz-bang, career-maintenance, political-ego-renewal phase again. Bust that if you can.